http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
BY MONDAY, the last day of John McCain's plausibility as a presidential
candidate, his campaign had become a protracted snarl. Time and
television had done their work, and the nation had seen him steadily and
seen him whole, and had seen an angry man.

If on Monday he had not been angry about the "sleazy money" of George
W. Bush's "Texas cronies," it would have been something else. Anger is
McCain's metier. It was said of Dwight Eisenhower (and could have been
said of Ronald Reagan) that his smile was his philosophy. It is not clear
what McCain's philosophy is, other than disdain for "interests" of the
"special" sort, but it certainly is not summarized in a smile.

The nation has elected only one president defined by his anger. But
Andrew Jackson, he of towering rages and durable grudges, would not
wear well in a wired age, when television forces Americans to live in
intimacy with presidents. Furthermore, McCain would have brought to the
presidency something of Woodrow Wilson's brittle temperament at the
time of his struggle with the Senate over ratification of the Versailles
Treaty, when Wilson was convinced he had cornered the market on
righteousness and would brook no compromise. McCain was the most
entertaining candidate in memory, and a McCain presidency would have
been as entertaining as Wilson's war with the Senate, but perhaps there
should be some limit to the sovereignty of entertainment values in politics.

Journalists created John McCain (one of his top campaign aides candidly
called the media McCain's "base") in their own self-image--almost
supernaturally honest and virtuous and witty and irreverent--and they
worshiped their creation. So it was perhaps to be expected that the
McCain episode, being largely an artifact of the media, would wind up
absurdly overanalyzed and preposterously overinvested with epochal
significance.

Tactically, McCain's campaign has been skillful and novel, brilliantly
exploiting the rules of the Republican nominating process--open
primaries--and the new fact of saturation political journalism. But
ideologically his campaign has been much more a recrudescence of late
19th-century populism than a rethinking of late 20th-century conservatism.

Conservatism is being redefined by exigencies faced by 30 Republican
governors governing about two-thirds of the American people. (In 1998
Republican gubernatorial candidates got 4 million more votes than their
Democratic opponents.) These governors have principal custody of the
principal issue (so far)--education. Which tells you how far along the
redefinition of conservatism has progressed: In five years Republicans have
gone from vowing to abolish the Department of Education to boasting
about giving the department hundreds of millions of dollars more than
President Clinton requested.

The last half of the last decade of the 20th century saw the exhaustion of
political rhetoric. No serious liberal still believes that conservatives aim to
roll back the welfare state, and no serious conservative believes that
today's omnipresent government has been imposed by stealth on a
reluctant nation in the dead of night.

The next few months will see a repositioning of Bush, a course correction
compensating for his rightward swerve to rally conservatives against
McCain. Bush, not an angry man, saw his campaign colored darkly by
some angry allies. One question Bush must weigh between now and the
Philadelphia convention at the end of July is whether his enhanced
credibility with conservatives will earn him more latitude in moving toward
the center, with policies and perhaps in selecting a running mate.

In 1996, probably for the first time, a president was elected while losing (
by one point) the male vote. Which means Clinton won with those most
put off by angry politics--women. McCain's capacious anger, the targets of
which include a substantial portion of his party, is just one reason why
Bush will be a stronger general election candidate than McCain would
have been. Another reason is that McCain, unlike Bush, has 18 years of
House and Senate votes for Al Gore to dredge up and misrepresent (as
Gore misrepresented, with devastating effect in an Iowa debate, a vote Bill
Bradley cast on disaster relief for farmers, and as Bush misrepresented
McCain's record on breast cancer research).

In three months Bush has been transformed from someone to whom much
seemed to have come a bit too easily--someone whose swift ascent
seemed to be a function of lightness--into someone who has shown
toughness in earning something.

The country, like Bush, is moderately conservative. Eight months is a long
time for Al Gore to pretend to be.
senator.